


Bed and Bath

by Gilded_Pleasure



Series: Within These Walls [2]
Category: Elementary (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Arguments, Awkward Conversations, Bathtubs, Bickering, Domestic Bliss, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Filth with Feelings, Fluff and Angst, Honest Conversations, Important Conversations, Joanlock - Freeform, Oral Sex, Sex, Sherlock Cooking, So many emotions, Sorry Not Sorry, The Most Important Meal of the Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-30
Updated: 2015-04-30
Packaged: 2018-03-26 13:16:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3852283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gilded_Pleasure/pseuds/Gilded_Pleasure
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock isn't okay, but when has he ever been?<br/>It matters little; Joan needs him now.<br/>If only he can figure out how to give her... everything, anything, or whatever she could possibly want from him. This is their home, and she feels safe here, just like he does. He knows because she's the only person who's left him that actually came back.<br/>She won't leave again.<br/>Right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bed and Bath

Sherlock Holmes wrenched his wrists a bit harder than was necessary inside the handcuffs that held him fast against the wooden chair, and tried to ignore the dull roar of panic that hovered ominously just over his mental horizon.

Eyeing the reflective surface of the toaster, which had migrated its way onto the table in the lock room sometime last week for an experiment, he reassured himself that Joan still slept soundly on the couch, a tangle of dark hair visible above the blanket he'd left draped over her snoring form.

She still refused to believe him when he told her she snored.

It would have been simple enough to provide empirical evidence of the facts with an audio recording, but he'd ruined that particular venture for himself years ago when, on an unrelated matter, Joan had made it very clear that she did not appreciate being recorded as she slept under any circumstances whatsoever. Oddly enough, she'd never made similar prohibitions against observing her himself whilst sitting in any of the suspiciously comfortable chairs she had strewn about her bedroom. He owed several of the best REM cycles in his recent memory to a few of them.

As quietly as he could, which was near-silently, he turned his head over his shoulder and spat the lockpick he'd been worrying out of his cheek with his tongue into his cuffed left hand. He had been a bit lax lately in keeping up with his ambidexterity training; besides the benefits of keeping one's brain hemispheres developmentally balanced, who knows when it could become imperative that he be able to pick left-handed.

A contingency plan for every contingency plan.

With a twist of his lips at the inherent irony, he peered narrowly at the blur of red and black that was Joan's slumbering reflection. He sorely regretted the lack of a real contingency plan to deal with the most recent turn of events in their relationship. Not that he hadn't considered myriad ways it could be possible to survive a sexual encounter with the peerless Joan Watson, should such a remarkable occasion occur, but they appeared to be deplorably out of date, no longer applicable, or otherwise unsuited to the rather unique situation that had somehow crept up on him before he'd entirely realized something dire had shifted in their relationship.

And he still wasn't sure what it was that had pushed them past that particular boundary. Joan, for all she gave lip service to the communication of emotions, could turn viperishly taciturn at the drop of a hat when these topics veered towards analyzing her own motivations and desires. Especially when they ran counter to certain illusions about herself she held rather dearly.

He'd made it his business long ago to see straight to heart of what Joan wanted, only to run up against the barriers she created between whatever it was and herself. She wanted, but she didn't _want_ to...want. It was such a bafflingly circular concept. And sometimes, he had to admit, it made him unaccountably frustrated.

He stilled his shaking hands through sheer force of will as he ruminated on several conversations they had had on that last case months ago, the one that reached its conclusion just before Joan had handed Andrew her own poisoned beverage by mistake, and a man she had tried and failed to love had died in her arms.

\- - -

The yawning gulf Kitty's departure had left in the brownstone had made him drastically reevaluate many things about the way he chose to conduct his affairs. Their time together hadn't lasted very long, but it had been extraordinarily eventful; the hotheaded younger woman had brought her entirely own brand of chaos into his life, and left an nigh-unbearable stillness in her wake. At first he'd thought himself bored, but it became clear after inundating himself with cold cases, arranging some fascinating if rather contrived liaisons with a few enthusiastic associates, and renewing his dedication to physical and mental conditioning, that his boredom was in fact a combination of loneliness and the absence of structure a flatmate of a certain compatibility provided. Cooking for his own sake was terribly uninteresting; he'd been just as happy to fuel his body with whatever wholesome dreck found its way into his bowl as he puttered about, gesturing at Angus with his spoon as his monologues (occasionally accompanied by flecks of milky oat bran that began to dot the ceramic phrenology bust) spilled forth, uninterrupted.

Sherlock had discovered himself to be rather shockingly at loose ends.

He'd become discomfortingly accustomed to having a flatmate, and to having regular speech-facilitated interaction between his thoughts and another human being. In regard to Watson, the belated realization that individuals were not interchangeable, even when the type of relationship _seemed_ identical, had been accompanied by more than a little chagrin. The whole affair left him with the sensation of having had his life in New York abruptly restarted; it had led him to looking more closely at her and her other relationships than had probably been wise. His pent-up desire for worthwhile interactions had certainly loosened his tongue regarding those matters than was advisable in retrospect.

“You really mustn't feel badly about not wanting to meet Andrew's parents. The man's always been something of a placeholder for you,” he'd found himself stating casually into the middle of an unrelated conversation about their current case, as he dove into a fresh pile of documents to be scanned and filtered through his consciousness.

“Placeholder?” she replied dryly, the very opposite of outraged at the suggestion. Interesting. “I never said that.”

As if she'd _needed_ to say it. She'd been going through the motions of a romantic relationship rather mechanically, but to his recollection the last time she'd been moved to any show of real emotion regarding Andrew was when she'd (quite mistakenly) believed Sherlock had been trying to get _rid_ of him. Some imagined nefarious plot to entice her erstwhile paramour towards Copenhagen.

He'd been entirely truthful about his feelings toward Andrew then, as he had been regarding his feelings about her. Embarrassingly direct, in fact. _You and I are bound, somehow._ Sherlock liked Andrew, but unfortunately for him, that was all Joan seemed to feel towards him as well.

He'd gamely continued, “You've also, in all the time you've dated, never displayed even a hint of the intoxication which accompanies new love. The man is back permanently, seeking a modest escalation of the relationship, and you're forced to confront your lack of passion for the man.” He couldn't restrain himself from ending with a rather pointed,“That's a line of thinking which leads inevitably to a breakup.”

“I don't want to break up with Andrew. We're just sort of starting out,” she'd said, with more confusion than angst.

The truth came out of his mouth before he thought to check it.

“If you don't want to break up with him, then why does the idea of meeting his parents fill you with a nameless dread?” Luckily, the case called them both away immediately after that.

The next evening, he'd been assuaging his professional and personal disappointments by watching Clyde paint (the fellow could be awfully maudlin, sometimes), when Joan's abrupt arrival at the brownstone caught him off guard. She practically stomped into the sitting room, an oddly compressed fury in her movements, long black frock swirling about from her dramatic entrance.

“Watson, what are you doing here?” he'd asked softly, awed a bit by the way her presence had suddenly filled every corner of his residence with its crackling, unmistakable energy. She was magnificent.  
Setting her small clutch on the side table, she spoke with an affected, flippant tone clamped over whatever she had simmering inside.

“Oh, I just came here to punch you.”

As he sat there like a dumbfounded clod, she had actually stalked over to him and delivered the aforementioned blow quite soundly to his shoulder. His emphasis on her self-defense had paid off; she'd nearly managed a certain disabling blow to a branch of the brachial plexus he'd advised her on multiple occasions to use against larger, stronger foes. Considering he'd paid good money for less committed beatings than the one she'd just favored him with, he hitched his shoulder appreciatively as he benignly inquired,“What was that for?”  
She'd whirled back to him and almost hissed, “I hate it when you're right!”

He stood up, stiffly swinging his slightly numb arm, and asked brusquely, “Was this about your dinner?”

“It was _totally_ a meet the parents thing!” she exclaimed, eyes fiery and gesticulating wildly.

He gawped at her; rarely had he seen her in such a state.

“There really is no version of meeting someone's parents that doesn't involve _actually_ meeting their parents,” he'd managed, at a loss.

Of all the possible reactions to his innocent meddling, he hadn't expected what was, for her, a near meltdown. No wonder she had always steered conversations away from her idiosyncratic behaviors, if this was the result of having them pointed out to her. He was feeling the first stirrings of regret for having said a word about her romantic endeavors in the first place, but he could find no immediately evident reason for this subsequent outburst.

“You know what I mean. And Andrew's father was so... amazing; he was warm and welcoming. He was obviously so thrilled that I was dating his son. I mean, it went about as well as you could possibly imagine,” she ranted, spitting the words as if they were a loathsome taint on her tongue.

He indicated her full-blown rage display with his outstretched hands and remarked crisply, “And yet.”

Her anger softened to disbelief as she continued, “I didn't want any of it. I just didn't feel comfortable. I mean, Andrew is smart, he's kind, he doesn't dress like a high school student who just got expelled...”

She turned away, muttering, “What is _wrong_ with me? I'm not feeling anything I'm supposed to be feeling.”

And there it was. The same way Joan had always twisted herself into knots, fighting viciously against herself for reasons that Sherlock had no choice but to accept, although he could never quite follow them. As calmly as he could, he relayed to her what he saw as the factual matters at hand, trying to keep the bitterness from his voice.

“I am an expert in many things, but love is not one of them. I do know, however, it cannot be reduced to a checklist of traits. You know, you might have to accept the fact that whatever your relationship with Andrew _means_... you just don't want it.”

She had gaped at him a moment before gesturing helplessly, “Then what _do_ I want?”

“I dunno,” he'd slurred vaguely, looking down, before pointing out one painfully obvious fact she'd neglected to pick out from the tangled mess she'd made of her thoughts.

“But while you're sorting that out, you might inadvertently be treating a kind man... rather shabbily.”

She'd groaned at that; muttered, “Well, I know what needs to happen,” rather ominously. In the wake of such a delicate and somehow exhausting conversation, he'd allowed himself to become utterly distracted by the case, and the fact that Joan, for the first time in far too long, had deigned to spend the night at the brownstone. It had occurred to him that he was most likely enabling her avoidance of an uncomfortable interpersonal situation, but he'd been too thrilled by her presence and accustomed to performing that role to make much note of it.

He'd greeted her in the morning with her favorite breakfast, clothing he'd purchased in case of just such an event (including shoes), a genuine smile, and a happy call of greeting instead of the other high concept awakenings he'd considered. He surmised she had surfeited on discomfort the previous evening, and his unadulterated joy in watching her accept his gifts had driven his quibbles over her interpersonal relationships out of his mind.

Twelve hours after that, Andrew had choked out his last breath under Joan Watson's frantic, helpless hands.

\- - -

Sherlock almost dropped the cuffs as they let go with a barely-audible click.

Rather than affixing another of the 23 pairs currently laid out on the table in front of him, he stood up and stalked quietly back over to the couch where he'd left Watson asleep some hours ago. After she'd used the toilet, she'd found him where he'd sat back down after disposing of the effluvia of their encounter, reading one of the few sociology journals he preferred to have in hard copy. After dressing in her previously discarded nightshirt and the fluffy red sweater she favored, she'd joined him on the couch and dug her cold bare toes under his warm leg, wiggling them obscenely. He'd grimaced melodramatically while regaling her at length with the 19th century criminologist Cesare Lombroso's theory that women specifically inclined toward certain behaviors of a lascivious nature had uncommonly prehensile toes. She'd fallen asleep smiling at his genial discomfiture.

As he gazed down into her sweetly sleep-slack visage to estimate when she might awaken, his heart clenched painfully with visceral recollections from earlier in the evening. He'd flinched away from the raw despair and need he'd seen distorting her beautiful face after the words has slipped from her like lifeblood, _we both ask for too much_. He'd have carved out a pound of his own flesh and thrown it at her feet if it had been required to heal the wound she'd revealed to him; what she'd wanted had been simpler, and possibly more dangerous. _But she had asked._

Their encounter had been nothing less than the clash of Titans he'd assumed it would be, but he took a moment as he listened to Joan's familiar, even breaths in wonder. What on earth had moved a woman so inherently, almost violently conflicted to invite a situation she'd obviously considered and dismissed many times during the course of their acquaintance? There had been no doubt in the moment that she'd wanted him, but what Joan wanted and what Joan was willing to allow herself created an overly voluptuous Venn diagram.

Had he said or done something to tip the balance? Behaved in an unconsciously untoward manner? Calling up the sequence of events, he could find no falsehood or guile in himself, but he well knew that he tended to emphasize certain truths when convenient. _Never underestimate the intellect's capacity for self-justification._ Sherlock Holmes was an addict, and no matter how he dressed it up, he still excoriated himself with the axiom: _addicts lie_. Especially to themselves.

The familiar burn of shame drove him back to the middle of the floor where his black trousers still sat in a dim lump. He pulled them on and slipped down to the kitchen to check on the yoghurt he'd started a lifetime ago in preparation for Joan's breakfast, the one he'd planned before other events had transpired that nearly made him forget its existence. After washing his hands, he tied one of his aprons on over his bare chest and opened the oven, which had been maintained at precisely 40 degrees for the last seven hours and pleasantly wafted warm, milky air over his face and arms.

The sensation spurred a strong sensory memory of the endless lasagnas and casseroles he'd made in the wake of Andrew’s death, ingredients prepared and portioned, sauces slow-simmered for half the day before being meticulously packed away for assembly and final baking at Joan's apartment. Opening and closing the oven to check the bubbling progress, lifting the foil he'd placed to carefully to keep the cheese on top from burning. Later, scraping the cold, untouched squares from her plate into her bin without comment.

He'd more or less filled her refrigerator with all of his pyrex bakeware, each with one meticulously incised square missing. Trying to figure out a way to stack them in the crowded refrigerator before finally giving in and scraping them clear completely, filling the entire bin with dried-out, cold curls of cheese, pasta, and vegetables, wrinkling his nose at something he'd tried with a particularly repellent-smelling tin of salmon. He'd surreptitiously gotten rid of it the entire mess down the rubbish chute in the hall before she'd emerged from the shower one morning.

And yet, he continued to cook and bring her sustenance until the night she'd told him she was moving back to the brownstone.

That she was coming back _home_.

He carefully set the heavy dutch oven filled with yoghurt on the burner, closed the oven and slid down the cupboards onto the floor, heels of his hands pressed against his eyes, filled with dread. All manner of people had passed out of his life, and he had become somewhat accustomed to the process, if not inured to the loss. Allistair's death had steamrollered him flat; he'd barely managed to struggle back from the edge of despair, the specter of an empty and endless future of maintaining his sobriety bringing him close to a relapse. Mycroft's departure had been unexpectedly painful, and shockingly bitter. He'd had to accept that some wounds given and received would remain unhealed, perhaps forever now. Irene had never existed in the first place, which had made it better at first but ultimately was much _worse_ , somehow. An infinite guessing game that could ensnare his mind for the rest of his life, wallowing in self-recrimination for eternity, if he allowed it.

Joan's departure had been harder to accept than any of the rest, because there had been no logic to it, nothing but the obvious fact that she was drawing away, rejecting him and the life they'd created here together inside these walls. _Here_ contained everything that kept him from the edge of madness and despair (and the apathy that was worse than either of them). What was _everything_ to him was clearly optional for her, an indulgence or a lark, something to be undertaken when convenient.

And the utterly unbearable knowledge that she was rejecting it all _because_ she wanted it, and she didn't _want_ to want it. That was what had chased him across an ocean. The absolute incomprehensibility of it all, except that he _did_ understand, he understood _exactly_ how it felt to hate yourself for wanting something so badly it set your bones on fire... and it was intolerable to believe he'd caused that kind of conflict in Joan Watson, who deserved both more and less, or maybe just _better_. Better to remove himself completely, better to give her the space she wanted, the freedom from whatever made her decide that what she wanted was bad for her.

It had taken him months of sleepwalking through cases and being sacked by MI6 for him to realize how ruinously, perhaps unforgivably wrong he had been, about a very many things. That people aren't drugs, that structures can be adjusted, that you _can_ in fact settle for less than everything. It did not come naturally or easily to a man like him; addicts have very little use for such concepts as moderation. He'd ended up in a kind of sober rock bottom, weeping uselessly in the dingy flat in London. He'd been torturing himself with his past mistakes and the future one in the little white packet when Kitty Winter had blown into his life like a hurricane, forcing his feet onto the path that sent him crawling back across the Atlantic to see if he could recover the nose he'd severed to spite his face.

And now, after everything, for the first time in his life, someone who had left him had come back. For all the wrong reasons perhaps, and not under the best circumstances, accompanied by a host of complexities and baggage and much the worse for wear; but Joan had _come back_. He had no idea whether they were helping each other now or just finishing up with shattering each other to bits, but whatever else fate had in store, he knew he couldn't bear for her to leave again.

He'd taken his hands from his eyes some time ago, and realized he'd been repeatedly stroking the tattoo on this inside of his left wrist with the opposite thumb. He didn't have to read it to remember what it told him, although the letters faced inward; the message of this mark was for its bearer. _**Discipline**_. Sherlock stood up shakily, and ran cool water over his hands at the sink, splashing some on his face before wiping at it hard with a kitchen towel.

The sky turned a luminous blue-grey while he gathered the receptacles for both the dense yoghurt and the watery whey, which he poured off from the top of the mixture. He dipped a spoon in and tasted the batch impassively; he didn't like it, but he analyzed its texture and tartness expertly. The batch was perfect, to Joan's taste. Epicureanism may have been an inexact science, but only imperfect things were in _want_ of perfecting. He prepared an ice bath to chill the smaller portion he planned to use for Joan's morning repast, before filling the remainder of the jars to chill slowly in the refrigerator.

Opening it, he took in the organizational systems that had slowly emerged after he'd agreed years ago to clean out the refrigerator once a month. Sherlock's food. Joan's food. And Clyde's food, although they both had upon occasion remarked on the overlap between the latter two.

He pulled out the milk bottle and took a moment to construct his own breakfast in a slapdash fashion, cereal and milk poured in equal amounts into one of his oversize bowls, which Joan had coined “Sherlock's feed troughs.” He sat primly at the kitchen table to chew his mechanical (and, he admitted, somewhat bovine) way through his tiresome but necessary predawn ritual. Structure was the larger part of recovery.

After swallowing a well-masticated mouthful, he held his breath a moment to wait for a sound he fully anticipated hearing... there it was, a faint snore. At times it seemed that tendrils of his essential self reached out into every corner of his home, alert to the smallest sound and slightest smells that reliably informed him of any movements or changed circumstances within these walls. He had, in retrospect, romanticized the sanctity of his former flat on Baker Street, but _this_ place and everything in it had become a part of himself more than anything London had to offer him. It was a safe place. It was no wonder Joan had been drawn back here.

His jaw stilled as something that should have noticed a very long time ago finally clarified: to the best of his knowledge, which was reasonably complete, Joan had never once engaged in coitus within the confines of the brownstone. That part of her life had always been conducted elsewhere, and although her partners had certainly visited, at no time had a sexual encounter between Joan and another human person occurred in their New York s _anctum sanctorum_. Until the previous night, of course, and her partner of choice had been himself. A wave of inexplicably dense emotions washed over him, and the only shape he could assign to it was a sincere wish that he had been better for her, hadn't been so caught up in the wonder and surprise of it all...that he hadn't himself needed and asked for _too much_.

He'd been sitting with a mouthful of half-chewed mush for quite some time, and it was suddenly overwhelmingly disgusting that it should be there at all. He reflexively spat in back into the bowl with a small splash, and picking it up with shaking hands, walked it to the bin, kicked open the lid and dumped it in, spoon, bowl, and all.

A concrete fact: failure to behave within the parameters of a strictly defined relationship had profound and measurable _effect_ on that relationship. He scrubbed a tattooed forearm back and forth over his forehead as he stalked stiffly but almost-silently back and forth across his kitchen.

A tentative fact: Joan Watson had made verbal statements to the effect that sexual activity was not something that she considered to fall under the umbrella of a relationship deemed _friendship_ , although her behavior did not always align with what she professed to believe.

A problematic fact: patterns of human behavior were not attributable to coincidence, and behaviors that can appear innocuous can often be the most crucial piece of a puzzle, or a person. He stopped pacing and leaned with his hands braced against the kitchen counter, took a deep breath in and held it before letting it out as slowly as he could manage.

An indisputable fact: he could not bear to be alone with his thoughts for much longer without losing the admittedly tenuous hold on his sanity he had nonetheless become rather accustomed to having.

Desperately subsuming mental tumult with physical activity and familiar ritual, he opened the refrigerator and chose several different types of berry and a crenshaw melon, setting them on the countertop before retrieving the small bowls and vessels he'd accumulated for this purpose over the years. He reached into the cupboard and added a jar of honey from his own apiaries.

Cutting the melon into measured chunks and filling each bowl with a separate type of fruit was calming enough to allow a certain sense of fatalistic calm to creep over him. As he used a pair of kitchen scissors to shred fresh mint leaves over the chilled bowl of thick homemade yoghurt, he briefly considered bringing Clyde along, but couldn't quite justify strong-arming the poor chap into what could potentially become a rather fraught situation, merely for his own comfort. He finished the tray off with two spoons and one of the ridiculously massive water glasses she'd brought from her former apartment, topped off with the bottled sparkling water she seemed to favor recently.

On the way back to the sitting room, he scooped up the wooden chair he'd utilized earlier, and stood a few moments with tray in one hand, chair in the other, as he chose a spot for each. He set the chair directly (and quietly) in front of the couch, where Watson's snores had turned to the half-mumbling snortles that indicated she was rising up towards consciousness (whatever she claimed later).

As he lowered himself down in it, he placed the tray across his own lap, and settled in to watch her transformation from unconscious to conscious. As always, it would remind him of watching the first _Euglassia Watsonia_ chew through its natal cell, an entirely new species reveling in the act of its own becoming, trembling and astonished under the weight of its own miraculous existence as it emerged into the light of day.

Some activities were incapable of becoming tiresome.

\- - -

She was shoving berries into the yoghurt, and then stuffing her face with them rather than using a spoon, although she'd used the other to liberally drizzle honey over almost everything; it still stuck out of the jar in case she decided to have more.

“Why don't you ever call me Joan?”

He blinked at her uncomprehendingly. “I have, many times, used your given name to refer to you.”

“I know that, but only because I asked Mycroft about it. He said that you always called me Joan when you two had your...discussions about me.” She licked a honeyed finger, then gestured towards him vaguely with it. “I meant, why don't you _address_ me as Joan? It's always Watson, or _you_ , or just...nothing. You just start talking.”

Of all the patently false and bizarre premises... His jaw worked as he stared a hole into the spines of several books in the wall behind her.

“You're picking an argument with me for reasons I have yet to determine. It won't work.”

She didn't even look up.

“Why are you always deflecting like that? Why won't you just say what you mean?”

His nostrils flared as he inhaled the sudden urge to pick up the chair he was sitting in and hurl it across the room. Envisioning it shattering her desktop computer was rather satisfying, and he had no doubt he could accurately throw it that far, but suppressing unwholesome impulses was second nature to him at this point in his life. _Always_ and _never-_ ing him; the contentious language of absolutes grated his raw nerves. She had to have known that being so blatantly and deliberately obtuse was its own form of camouflage, especially coming from her.

He took a deep breath, and said tersely but slowly,“I am a man who _has_ always and _will_ always wear his proverbial heart on his sleeve. I fail to recognize how it is _my_ problem that people who do not like what they see there choose to believe me to be otherwise.”

He caught her rolling her eyes at that in his peripheral vision as she swirled a raspberry around in the larger bowl. It hurt quite a bit more than he'd imagined it could, and she remained (stubbornly?) silent and chewing.

“I could just as well ask _you_ why, in all the years you have lived here with me,” he blurted as his fingers danced madly on his knees, “you have never once brought home one of your various _paramours_ to stay over at the brownstone. Or engaged in any manner of sexual activity under this roof until last night, with-.” He half-made and then jerkily retracted an imprecise gesture, cutting himself off. The echo of his own voice from the night previous rang in his ears.

_Joan, please._

So much for his iron self-discipline.

She had gone still, and he tilted his head slightly to look at her. Her face was slack with surprise and something else he couldn't read, even now, but her lovely dark eyes were very open, staring at him searchingly.

She whispered slowly through a mouthful of breakfast, “You look terrible.”

He pursed his lips peevishly and glanced down at his bare feet sticking out of much-abused-over-two-days trousers, apron still tied over his bare chest and scabbed sides, and managed to look back up at the bookshelf behind her without touching his hair. Instead of taking the bait, he tried to find the source of the shame welling up in him again as he admired how decidedly not-terrible Watson looked. He remained bemused by the delicious unfairness of her looking the way she did of a morning, despite the fact that she was a good five years older than himself. Was he ashamed for having lashed out at her? For having lost control?

No, it was simpler than that.

No, more complex, actually.

The look on her face was concern.

And he couldn't help but feel ashamed that he was so obviously a mess when _she_ was the one who needed someone to lean on, for a change. He felt the same needling irritation that she saw right through him as always, but stubbornly insisted that _she did not_ with her words and gestures. But there were only so many confrontations with his own capacity for failure he could absorb without recoil. He opened his mouth, and an odd grunt emerged before he snapped his teeth closed, stood up with another aborted gesture that turned into a vague flutter of his hand, and walked in a stiffly measured pace towards and up the stairs.

He closed the bathroom door behind him, and twisted the taps before turning to glance briefly in the mirror. He'd seen far worse, although the dark circles under his eyes _were_ unusually spectacular. He watched his fingers rub against his grubbily-clad thigh ( _repugnant_ ), then stripped off and got in the shower, wincing a bit at the heat of the water but not adjusting the temperature. Washing himself thoroughly but quickly, he watched the last of the soap rinse itself down the drain before pulling up the switch to close it. He ousted the shower curtain to drip out on the floor with a petulant flip of his arm, sat down a bit heavily, and let the bath fill around his sorry carcass as he sank back to brood.

Watson was rummaging about the flat, muttering at herself, presumably; he couldn't make it out. After a moment she sighed, and he heard her trudging steps up the stairs. Instead of going to her bedroom as he expected, she paused in front of the bathroom door. Turned the knob. He gave her a critical look as she opened the door and shut it behind her, and she narrowed her eyes back at him as she walked past the tub and his line of sight, sat on the toilet, and began to urinate copiously with a long-suffering sigh. He was supine in the steaming tub and facing the opposite direction, but provided commentary without turning his head.

“Your obsession with proper hydration is not without its consequences, _Doctor_ Watson. Although I'm somewhat surprised to see you break with your perpetual iron code of only one detective at a time when using the facilities, as impractical as it may be.”

The noise she made might have been an amused grunt.

“I don't have anything you haven't seen already _now_ ,” she replied wryly.

“Well-” he uttered before he caught himself, clicking his teeth shut with a pained grimace at the wall.

“Wait, what?” she squawked, flushing the toilet and coming over to lean against the wall and look down at him. She was acting outraged, but he gauged it extremely affected as she said angrily, “Have you been _peeping_ at me or something?”

He gave her the sourest face imaginable before indicating his wiry body under the hot water with his chin, and replied tightly, “Are you under the misapprehension that I am fourteen years of age?”

He carded his fingers through the hairs on his chest, many of which were decidedly grey, matching the stubble on the chin he'd pointed with. He lay there shamelessly as roadkill, knees poking up out of the transparent water, which afforded no coverage to his flaws or assets to speak of. “Or, contrary to all observation and evidence, sexually _repressed_ in some unspeakable manner?”

Sherlock tried to relinquish his stranglehold on annoyance, sat up tiredly, and sighed, “A few times you failed realize I was home, or awake, and left one room or another to retrieve an item; I didn't pay much attention, nor did I _linger_ ,” he continued pointedly, rolling his head on his neck to fix her with an offended, sidelong glare as he continued, punctuated with a stabbing motion of his left hand. “You certainly have nothing to be ashamed of, and I hardly harbored the illusion that beneath your trench coat you were actually two very small people, one stacked up on the other's shoulders,” he finished with an ironically illustrative gesture.

She looked down at him, her trumped-up outrage departed, a strand of sleep-tousled black hair falling charmingly over her freckled olive cheekbone. “Why didn't you say anything?” she asked softly, leaning in and hanging her head down to peer at him closely. He slapped at the water impatiently.

“So this conversation has been just as much a joy to you as it has been to me, then?” he barked, sighing through flared nostrils as he looked away. He wiped at his dripping nose, and tried to push through his customary impatience; she didn't deserve to be sniped at because he was angry with himself.

“The last thing I desired was to cause insult to your modesty, and despite our extended cohabitation, I have done everything _possible_ to respect it,” he said in a carefully measured tone.

She looked down at him for a moment, then quite deliberately reached down to the hem of her nightshirt and drew it up, revealing herself slowly. He gaped at her, breath stuck in his throat as he took in her thighs and where they met, stomach, pert breasts with their smallish brown nipples catching at the fabric, then it was off and over her head, black hair falling down like curtains released to frame the exquisitely vulpine artwork of her face.

She smiled at his body's predictable response to her immodest rebuttal, and replied, “You know you use up all the hot water with your whole shower-then-a-bath trick, right?” as she climbed into the tub with him.

He tilted his head and raised an eyebrow silently in acknowledgement, admiring the way the blueish morning light through the frosted glass window caught the scar at the top of her right breast as she sighed at the water's heat.

“That's why I never brought anyone home here, you know,” she said as she rubbed wet hands over her face and looked for the bottle of soap, which he immediately reached behind her to grab and hand over.

He watched her rub some on her face in fascination, asked quietly, “Because I use up all the hot water?”

She laughed close-mouthed, the sound held deep in her throat as she rinsed off. Without answering, she leaned back, stretching out with her legs tucked together to one side of his hip. He was nevertheless afforded quite a view as she dunked her hair into the water behind her.

Sitting back up, she murmured, “No one's ever accused me of being overly modest before,” as she grabbed the shampoo bottle and squirted some out into her hand. “It's just _you_ ; you have this way of seeing...”

She worked the shampoo into her hair unhurriedly, legs everywhere and taking up more than her fair share of space in the tub, which he allowed considering he was already finished with his own ablutions.

His heart clenched as she looked at him seriously under a cap of white foam.

“You see too much,” she said finally, a statement of fact as she saw it.

Which, of course, stung like an accusation.

“D'you think I _want_ to?” he rasped rawly, eyes narrowed.

She casually laved water over her arms and chest repeatedly, weighing her words even as she spoke them.

“No, I'm actually sure you don't, and I've seen... what it can do to you. What you do to yourself, sometimes, not that you can help it. Or change it.” She leaned back again to rinse out her hair, eyes closed, the soap flowing out into the water and slowly obscuring her body beneath it.

“But that doesn't mean it doesn't matter, or isn't hard to live with, or make it any less...” She stayed like that a few moments, her face a luminous moon in the shifting sky of bubbles and the black swirl of her hair beneath the water.

“...any of the _rest_ of what it is,” she finished in a soft whisper, eyelids flickering.

Then she slid back up, pushing her hair back, and smiled slightly. “Anyhow, you would have heard everything, maybe seen something... god, probably _smelled_ it. It was bad enough having you making comments about _my gait_ ,” and she grinned at that, leaning forward slightly to waggle her head at him in the charmingly unaffected way she had.

He opted to say nothing, since he could hardly deny it, and just looked at her. She was accustomed to subtly and expertly darkening her eyebrows with cosmetics; this tended to give her a more grave and thoughtful aspect when they were working, which he liked and appreciated. In the bath, the lack thereof served to lend a certain openness and informality to her expressions, which he also liked and appreciated. As with every other small adjustment she habitually made to her appearance, it was ultimately irrelevant to her innate attractiveness.

He only realized he'd begun to lean towards her when she put her hands on the sides of the tub and stood up to soap herself briskly. Settling back, it became apparent that if there was some subtle re-negotiation of the terms of their relationship occurring, she had him at a profound disadvantage. In fact, the ambiguity of the current situation in both macrocosm and microcosm was making him exceedingly uncomfortable, but it did not lessen his admiration of Watson's trim figure rising above him like a foamy Venus, nor his physical response to it, which was making him begin to question his earlier assertion that he was not in fact fourteen years of age.

Perhaps his arousal was merely piqued by the reversal of her previous insistence on decorum, but her exhibitionism would have been driving him to distraction if it hadn't been ever-so-slightly tinged with resignation. He could have wished the sadness it caused him had been enough to quell his desire, or that the two combined didn't cause the fiercely tender protectiveness he'd always felt toward her to rise like bile in his throat at the same time. And that last was what gave him the strength to realize and accept in the same moment that being the one _leaned upon_ also involved shouldering the burden of his own discomfort, rather than interrogating her as to the exact status of their partnership.

Especially now.

Joan hadn't lost her slight smile as she sat back down and rinsed herself in a great flopping of bubbles and water; he hated to consider the morass of two people's castoff filth it would be by now if he hadn't taken his brief shower beforehand. Then, to his surprise, she got up on her knees and leaned out over him, bracing her hands on the sides of the tub, before ducking her head down for the kiss he'd possibly been intending before she stood to finish washing up. Admiring her forethought, he reached up to steady her waist, once again reveling in the fact that wet skin offered such a distinctly separate tactile sensation than dry skin, or oiled skin, or sandy skin; it was just as remarkable that Joan's wet skin was as distinctly separate from that of any other person as to her own dry skin. An entirely unique experience.

She leaned back, breaking the kiss, and said without malice, “Stop cataloging me.”

He tilted his head up a bit uncomfortably, searching her face to some clue as to what she meant. She smirked, and leaned out abruptly for something on the floor beside the tub; his hand automatically provided a counterbalance for her weight so she didn't tip out or fall. He blinked a moment when he saw she had retrieved her discarded white nightshirt, then exhaled in wry understanding as she rolled the thin cloth loosely into a long strip.

_You see too much._

What the makeshift blindfold lacked in inherent opacity was made up for in the carefully meticulous way it was applied and tied, and the soothingly pleasant way it smelled quite strongly of Joan, and the ghost of what they'd been up to the night previous. He'd been party to such games in the past, although in extremely different and quite specific circumstances. But he was in the brownstone, and Joan was with him, and he wanted what she wanted. Besides, the way her pubic hair had brushed over his erection under the water as she leaned in to tie the blindfold had set off the kind of fireworks across his retinas that he customarily associated with sharp blows to the pate.

He reclined a bit, sliding his arms to lay along the rim of the tub, as he wondered if she realized his spatial awareness was mostly unaffected by lack of vision, especially in such a familiar environment. As if on cue, Joan adjusted her position over him and muttered with wicked amusement, “If you were anyone but _you_ , this would just be _too corny_.”

He considered the rather impressive implications of that statement briefly, but she had begun to touch his lips with her wet fingers, tracing them in a manner that was surprisingly pleasant and quite distracting. Then, she took his hand from where it lay, brought it to his chest and somehow wormed her own hand under his, flat against his breastbone. She pushed it upwards a bit, fingers floating through the hair on his chest underwater rather than carding through, and his hand hesitated over hers.

She leaned in and whispered, “Show me how you like it.”

His heart gave a massive _thump_ , and of course she felt it right through her palm, no sense in wondering. It had probably been visible in his throat, too; he mentally recalculated the relative appeal of the situation. His usual reply of _I don't_ hovered on the tip of his tongue, but he found himself swallowing it down, instead muttering in mock exasperation, “If you were anyone but _you_...” before leading her hand on a tour that he didn't often bother with, most of the time.

Women seemed predisposed to feathery fingertip touches he found unbearable; the explanation that he'd much rather have the taste slapped out of his mouth was neither the possible insult it could be taken as, nor was it poorly received by his usual partners. Dismissing the impulse to launch into a lengthy verbal explanation of that, he instructed the hand under his own to lead with the palm to where precisely he enjoyed being touched, and where to avoid. Considering there were relatively few of the former, he ended the tour where she had likely suspected it would, and exhaled softly through his nose as he wrapped her hand around him, noting that the sensation was different when submerged in a large amount of no-longer-extremely-hot water. After a brief tutorial in pressure and cadence, Joan proved herself the tactile genius he should have suspected she was considering her medical background, and he returned his hand to its former position as she brought in an additional one to squeeze the side of his hip quite firmly.

Being blindfolded and tossed off in a bathtub shouldn't have been disturbingly intimate, but not a moment passed that he wasn't aware of Joan; her breathing and her fragrance, her hands that almost seemed to be pressing her name into his skin. And yet, being unable to see what was coming lent the situation an air of anticipation that assuaged the urgency and irrational impatience that often plagued him during sexual encounters; it was part of why he preferred to be physically restrained under some circumstances. The elimination of visual distractions was also unexpectedly curbing his usual impulses to see and then touch, his partner's body tempting him with so many buttons to be pushed to spectacular effect. Joan was very good at what she was doing, and enjoyed it; he could hear how aroused she was in the pattern of her breathing. As he listened, she drew in a breath deeper than the others, then unexpectedly held it. He had a split second to think

_She can't be serious_

and her mouth was on him under the water. The shout he'd almost caught in his throat bounced off the walls as he tried not to curl inward reflexively. He was treated to the echo of his own extremely sincere gasps as she made the most of the contrast between the temperature of the water and that of her mouth, pulling back his foreskin and allowing heat to flood against him, before demonstrating that her incrementally cooler and equally wet tongue was as talented as her hands had proven to be. Bubbles from her exhalation floated up noisily as she took him entirely inside her mouth, lending a subtle and false air of vague danger to a deceptively simple situation; it was possibly one of the most impressively obscene experiences he'd ever had. She was applying some of the stroking and pressure he'd been on the performing end of the previous night, and he marveled dizzily at the completeness of her revenge as he tried rather valiantly not to pass out from the combination of heat, his own fatigue, and the creeping edge of overstimulation.

She surfaced with a small splash, inhaling easily with no ill effects from her underwater excursion, and he heard her huffed amusement under the dripping. Understandable; he probably looked as dazed as he felt. He felt her lean back as she pulled up the latch to open the drain. “It's a little soapy in here for me,” she murmured throatily, then leaned in to victoriously kiss the lips he'd gasped dry with her wet, and indeed, slightly soapy-tasting ones. “And I don't want you going all vasovagal on me,” she finished wickedly as she pulled away.

She stood up and exited the tub, and as he heard her retrieving a plush towel from the rack, he raised his hand to lift the blindfold before he felt her dripping hand touch his. “Could you...leave it for now?” she asked tentatively, and he saw no reason to deny her request. He stood, dripping, and she immediately took the opportunity to rub at him roughly with the towel.

He promptly stole it from her, and proceeded to do his own drying off as she gave a patently false “uh!” of mock outrage. He heard another towel come off the bar, and then her voice cut sharply in his direction, “You don't have any cameras _in_ the house anymore?”

He pursed his lips a moment, considered prevaricating, then admitted, “there may be one that coincidentally captures a portion of the upstairs hallway in its surveillance.”

The thwap of her towel against his arm didn't come as much of a surprise as she might have hoped, and he didn't justify it with a response.

“Sherlock! You're showing me wherever you keep that footage and I'm erasing it later today. No exceptions, and no perverted _reminiscing_. The last thing I want to see is a video of our naked butts ending up somewhere...” He could almost hear the gesture that replaced the end of that sentence.

He stepped carefully but confidently out of the tub, which had completed draining by then, and rather than arguing the impossibility of any recordings ending up in hands other than his own, answered her concerns rather formally with a slight bow.

“I accept your terms.”

She made a short _pfft_ noise at him, then took his hand as he heard her open the door. She led him through the hall and into her bedroom as he had expected, and he was quite certain that she positioned him at the foot of her bed. Her hard shove took him a bit by surprise, but he let himself fall easily enough onto the mattress with a short bounce. She was crawling up after him, onto him, pressing her hands to his shoulders before leaning down to hiss in his ear.

“See? Even when you can't see anything, you see everything. Do you know what I'll say before I say it, too?”

He frowned hard under the band of cloth over his eyes. And here he had thought they were done bickering, but as always, he remained at a disadvantage.

“Don't be absurd.”

She was silent.

“I had no idea you were going to push me.”

“You knew you weren't going to fall the floor,” she replied contentiously.

“But I don't know what _you_ are going to do.” He might have been more annoyed if she hadn't been rubbing her soft belly against his rapidly returning erection. He kept his arms by his sides, unsure of but willing to participate in whatever this conversation was becoming.

“I just... I _know_ you. I can reliably predict your intentions and responses in a number of standard situations,” he ruminated gamely, briefly thankful that he had absolutely no expectations of maintaining any semblance of dignity.

“And you know _me_ , Watson” he continued, musing aloud as she undulated softly against him. It was like seeing small flashes of her through his skin; a charming alternative to being mauled with someone's hands like dough. Although he considered the maulings he'd received from Joan's hands in particular had been nothing short of spectacular, so perhaps a revisitation was in order. He continued, “Better than anyone. But the closer I am to something...or someone, the less clearly I am able to see. It's the projection of light inside a pinhole camera: all details become dim, and upside down.” He inhaled heavily and slowly as she resumed some of her earlier activities.

He sighed out under her caresses, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but _then-_ ,” He caught his breath as her left hand became unexpectedly adventurous, sighed it out again with,”... but then shall I know, even as also I am known.”

She had him quoting the King James at her now. How _indescribably_ vulgar.

“You have never ceased to impress me,” he whispered fervently, feeling a bit light-headed once more. The bath had relaxed him; he'd apparently reached the sweet spot of sleep deprivation he cultivated and craved, that otherworldly space between waking and sleeping that facilitated his mind to fly where it willed. Random and disorderly connections were made possible as his usual thought process came unmoored from its well-trodden and somewhat rigid paths. It had been forty-eight hours at minimum since his last REM cycle, and fatigue poisons flooded his brain.

He noticed with more than a little wry amusement that he'd lifted his arms over his head at some point, and he locked a hand around the opposite wrist for stability, their crux pressing against the top of his scalp. Wrapped fingers covering _**Discipline**_. Revealing and offering _STAMINA_ writ large in the tender underside of the forearm opposite. Old habits died hard, and he was nothing if not an unparalleled collection of habits, old and new. He should have been more ashamed of pushing himself to extremes, for he did not engage in it for its own pure purpose, not entirely, but because he craved changes to his perception, slaking the insatiable thirst for the very pinnacles and even the valleys of his own consciousness. But he drank deeply from what wells had been left him, for to do otherwise would be to live inside an apology for his own existence; his own paradoxical, impossible existence.

Watson unexpectedly placed her mouth firmly at the offering of his ribcage, avoiding (unnecessarily) the marks she'd made at their previous encounter, and he felt her speak against it, pressing a violent, visceral shudder into and through his torso entire with her whispered words.

“But why do I _want_ to impress you?” she hissed wickedly, talented hands occupied elsewhere. He clamped his lips shut against a throaty moan as she pressed her wet finger against, then inside him. Let the sound out after all as she took the skin beside his hipbone between her teeth and bit down firmly, then harder.

His head swam deliciously as he moaned, “Because you want to know if you see as much as I do.” Her wordless and thorough interrogation continued mercilessly, and he found himself quite helpless to resist the truths she was pulling out of him.

“But you don't,” he choked out, arching under her tender ministrations. There was nothing of brutality in her touch, only calculated skill and manipulation. Remarkable. He was coming undone tidily as a blacksmith's puzzle, the twisted metal sliding apart into triangles and corkscrews, lining up in a neat row before her.

“Instead,” he panted, “you see everything that I've missed. An entire world laid out before you,” he grunted, “and forever closed to me.”

 _It has its costs_ , he thought wildly. _Learning to see the puzzle in everything._

“And _how_ you see; sometimes I try to imagine the exquisite- _ah_ -the exquisite _shape_ your thoughts must take,” he rasped, throat raw from his harsh, panting breath. “Even after all this time, you're something of a blind spot to me.”

She pulled her mouth away with an indrawn breath, causing him to shudder deliciously.

“Maybe that's just the blindfold,” she murmured thickly.

“I _like_ that I don't see everything,” he mumbled dizzily. “It's-”

\- - -

It's rare.

\- - -

_I like that I don't see everything. It's rare._

\- - -

It's-

\- - -

_His hand traced over Irene's undulating back, counting them again. “You know these, these birthmarks, they are almost exactly the same shape as the constellation Auriga.” Fingers tapping, the words tumbling out awkwardly as they always did with her.  
“Is that a good thing or bad?” she asked tauntingly._

_He stuttered out defensively, “Well, it's, I'm just, I'm surprised I've never noticed before. Even after all this time, you're something of a blind spot to me,” he finished, marveling at the truth of it as he spoke._  
“ _You say the sweetest things,” she drawled sarcastically, accent drawing out the vowels as she left the bed in what might have been a huff. He never quite knew where he stood with her, and he hurried to right the falling dominoes his words were becoming._  
“I like _that I don't see everything,” he protested._

“ _It's rare.”_

 _-_ \- -

As he tore the blindfold off in a panic, sunlight pierced his eyes painfully, filling them with water as they narrowed involuntarily. Joan had stopped what she was doing the moment she felt him tense, but as she leaned to move away, he touched her lightly with flat, open palms as he tried to blink the tears away and slow his breathing.

“Are you okay?” she asked in a small voice.

Her presence and her voice grounded him, as always. It wasn't a trick. There was nothing false here, this was no complex deception, and although he had seldom been in her room at this time of day ( _the sun in this position and window placement; should have expected that_ ), that generally meant she was sleeping in because there was no case, he was off and busy elsewhere in the brownstone....this was a safe place.

“I just needed to see,” he explained simply. As his sight began to focus on her, he sat up and guided her to remain sitting on his now-parallel thighs, hands with fingers stiffly extended, his palms brushing her upper arms over and over. 217 distinctive and separate markings graced the skin of Joan Watson, and they came clear to him now, even through the water blurring his vision. “Pupillary light reflex,” he mumbled, taking a brief moment to scrub his forearm as quickly as possible across his eyes, wanting to clear them without blocking his vision longer than necessary.

“Are you sure you're okay?” she reiterated stubbornly.

“Just a bit tired,” he sighed absently, eyes resting on mark 27; the mole at the base of her throat. He wanted to kiss it; he couldn't bear to stop looking at it. Joan radiated reality, the most solid and unquestionable bit of ground he had, no matter how they shifted. She made _him_ more real just by existing.

“At least now we know,” she said enigmatically, exhaling as she settled a bit back onto his legs. She didn't appear to need the rest, though. The woman's thighs seemed to have no tiring point; all that purposeless jogging about, he supposed. He reached up to cup her face, pressing her wildly damp hair to her ears as his thumbs caressed the wide, freckled cheekbones under her eyes. Exactly .48 centimeters of flawless skin between marks 134 and 135.

“What is it that we know?” he asked mildly, eyes scanning back and forth to count each lovely speckle.

“How much is _too_ much,” she said with a small, kind smile.

He let go only to slide his arms around her, pull her forward gently. He envied how she managed to express so much in so few words, just as he admired streamlined efficiency in all its forms. Purposeful communications like a razor that sliced through when his language became entangled in its own syntax, pedantry and poetry choking out the meanings of the words, obfuscating their truths. Her arms came up to return his embrace loosely.

“No,” he intoned quietly.

She hesitated, confused.

“Not _nearly_ enough,” he clarified, bumping the tip of his nose back and forth against her small, pointed chin. His embrace tightened with intent, tasting her jawline with his tongue a moment before he slurred roughly, “...if you allow?”

At her nod, he lifted her up and lowered her to lay in the sunbeam that had blinded him; he lay between it and she so that his body displaced the light that was cast over her face. He watched her pupils dilate slightly in his growing shadow as he leaned in and glided his hand over her chest and belly, rekindling the arousal that had lain quiescent in her concern. He didn't close his eyes when he kissed her.

She was full of vibrating tension against him, and when she opened her thighs under his hand, he found her so wet and willing that his two middle fingers slid down and sank into her as she tilted up hungrily. When he pressed the heel of his hand flush against her, curving his fingers, she broke their kiss and buried her face in his neck where she made an astounding, peerless _cooing_ noise; exhausted as he was, he branded the moment into his memory immediately without care as to what he may have carelessly overwritten in his depleted state.

He moved his arm at the shoulder, massaging against and into her soft wet velvet, thumb caressing the newly discovered mark 218, a nearly-imperceptible scar shining whitely for a fraction of a second in the sunlight streaming through the window, a beam picking it out near the junction of her right thigh. A reasonably immodest bathing suit would have covered it; anything less than direct sunlight would obscure its satin texture. He strained against her shamelessly in wonderment, and she responded vigorously. His own ragged breaths sounded unnaturally loud to his ears as he leaned back to reveal her face and pressed his forehead against hers.

“D'you want me?” he asked brokenly, between short, eager kisses.

He felt her nod. “In the drawer,” she sighed.

He leaned back and flailed a bit awkwardly for a moment, then found and pulled open the drawer to rummage inside, unable or perhaps just unwilling to tear his eyes away from her. His hand closed around what he sought quickly, and he tore a condom off its strip, shutting the drawer with a rattle before tearing the wrapper open with his teeth, his gaze reluctant to waver for even a moment. He applied it with impatient efficiency and rolled over her, staring at her mouth as he put his hand down between them, rubbing himself along her wetness for a lingering moment before pushing inside with a tight groan.

As they moved together eagerly, it became apparent that his exhausted limbs would insist on failing him before either of them had had their fill of the activities currently under way; he felt the slight tremble already in his left quadriceps. He was muzzily deciding on which contingency plan would bring the most satisfaction to them both when she smirked up at him, murmuring, “...you sure about that whole 'not too much' thing?” Doctors, damn the whole barmy lot of them.

He hid a smile of admiration in her soft breast, his lips brushing it as he replied breathily, “You underestimate my commitment. However, d'you make objection to a change of position?”

“No objections,” she sighed, before moving to allow him to disengage. He did so, and she proceeded to use one of her impeccably toned thighs to tip him gracelessly as a cow off and over her onto his left side, a great _uff!_ escaping his lips. He did his best to give her a resentful look. “Unconvincing,” she smiled, “and besides, I _tried_ to get you to come jogging with me.” The gently self-satisfied look on her face was causing a strangely tight feeling in his chest. Rolling his eyes, he curled up behind her as she rolled onto her own side, pushing back against him deliciously.

He put his hand on her hip, and noticed the position had pulled her head down below the level of the pillows, and she had rested it on the mattress itself at a rather awkward angle, although she still looked pleasantly anticipatory. He settled down onto his own shoulder, then gently pushed his own arm underneath her head in order that she use his biceps as a pillow, convenient for purposes of intimacy and comfort. However, his head was not far down enough to miss the reflexively vague but clearly defensive motion she made towards her own throat as she lifted her head to allow his arm access. He took yet another loan against his overtapped resources to suppress any physiological responses to consternation, shock, and a fractional moment of white-hot and sincerely murderous rage that tore through him as he realized that at some point, Joan had been yoked in this position. That is what she had half-moved to defend against.

He lifted his head very slightly on his neck to gauge her profile; eyes slightly open, staring though the window at the leaves the wind had begun to stir, small shadows dancing over the awareness on her face that he'd noticed her movement. _You see too much._ He carefully bent the arm beneath her head flat against the mattress to demonstrate its harmless intent, and moved his right hand from her hip to low on her chest, spread out just over the diaphragm. Her heartbeat was steady, as was her breathing. Dissembling would be an unspeakable insult to her, and creating an issue of it quite unnecessary. He bent his lips to her ear.

“That will never happen,” he enunciated clearly and quietly, keeping his tone conversational. “ _Nothing_ you don't want. _Ever_ ,” he finished, adding pressure from his hand low under her breastbone for mild emphasis.

“I know,” she replied simply, and he felt an inexplicably poignant pang as her hand covered his and drew it slowly down her body to where she evidently remained quite anticipatory of his attentions. He relished the heavy, smooth texture of her nearly-dry hair as she settled her head more comfortably on his arm; the scent of shampoo and her warm scalp filled his lungs along with a sharply indrawn breath as she moved against him enticingly. Not enticing, with _intent_ , as he discovered when she pushed his hand down further between her legs and maneuvered it against his still-viable erection, positioning it at her entrance. With a casual flick of her hips, she slid hotly onto him and arched back as he gasped appreciatively. He braced her uppermost leg with his in a practiced motion and penetrated deeply, using the tensile spring of the mattress beneath them to make up for the strength his limbs currently lacked.

It became clear rapidly that both of them were nearly mad with desire for release; he kept his hand wedged between her legs and put it to good use as she reached out to grip the bed's edge for leverage. The marked increase in friction he benefited from while thrusting between her mostly-closed legs had him at a rather tenuous plateau dismayingly quickly, but she was already racing ahead of him.

She thrummed with tension as she let go of the bed, reached up behind her to grab his head, dragging his stubbled face down to the side of her neck as she slammed into him again, arched back, and reached her tipping point abruptly with a thin wail. Her climax fluttered around him, and he was viscerally grateful for what it signified considering that he could not have stood against its insistence as it pushed him over the edge of inevitability. He was, however, unprepared for the unrivaled intensity of the storm that scoured his mind and body as he drove into her, hoarse sounds from his throat barely registering in his ears over the bursting motes of light and shadow that thundered through him.

He lay there utterly husked, attempting to regain his senses but finding them strangely evasive. Perturbed, he made a clumsily futile gesture between them to attempt to sort the situation, but he felt her slide away, then grasp the condom at its base before pulling it off, postcoital sensitivity making him grunt. A second inevitability was beginning to make itself quite clear to him, much to his intense (if swaddled-in-cotton-wool) chagrin.

“You're not throwing that thing around in _my_ bedroom,” she chided, and he assumed the subsequent sound was its disposal in the wastebasket under her bedside table. He attempted to open his eyes again, managed to make them flutter at half mast just enough to reach out to scrabble for Joan's waist and pull her on top of him, with her necessary (if slightly surprised) participation. He wrapped his arms around her sloppily but firmly, reveling in how delicious her slight weight was pressing down on him, before slurring, “I fear 'm 'bout to be unforgivably rude,” with a deep sigh of regret. Her shoulders shook, alarming him a bit, before her huffed breaths along his collarbone made him realize she was laughing at him. Good; he thoroughly deserved it. “Really?” she taunted, “one of the _cardinal sins of coitus_?”

“Mmmnnn,” he acknowledged.

“I know you only call it that because people think it sounds gross.”

“Rude,” he sighed vaguely, then his eyelids fluttered again. “Please feed Clyde for me.”

“I'll manage.”

He drifted a bit at that, then sucked in a sudden breath.

“For th'love 'f _god_ remember to wash your _hands_ first...”

"I was a _surgeon_ , Sherlock,” she replied with amusement. “I'm not going to touch your pet's food with my _butt-fingers_ ,” she choked out as she succumbed to another giggle, jostling him a bit as he sunk inexorably further from consciousness.

 _Now who's being RUDE_ , he thought forcefully as sleep rushed up to claim him in its soft and unforgiving embrace.

**Author's Note:**

> [[running up that hill-placebo](https://youtu.be/4KEEXyRL0qE)]


End file.
